This chapter is the first hands-on example in this book. It walks you through
the process of creating a Shockwave 3D file. For this chapter, we will use the
example of a fly-through house. Imagine that your house is for sale and that
you want to put more than a photo of it on the Internet. In Shockwave 3D, you
can easily create an interactive, fly-through version that allows viewers to
literally see the inside of your house.

When building a 3D model, you should first storyboard it, then 3D model it,
and then move your model into Director via the Shockwave exporter. After your
model is in Director, you can apply behaviors or Lingo to it to make it interactive,
or to give the interface a design. Finally, once you've finished it, you'll
export it to the Internet for delivery.

Note, in the previous chapter, I showed you how behaviors can accomplish complicated
tasks. In this chapter, I show you how to build the fly-through house model
without behaviors. Leave it to me to task you with the hard stuff before you
get half way through the book! Don't worry. I walk you through the details
step by step.

Storyboarding

The first step in building a 3D model is to storyboard the model. Depending
on your 3D modeling program, storyboarding (or drawing a model) can be precise
or it can just be a rough sketch, such as those you might draw on a napkin or
scrap piece of paper [3.1]. If
you have a 3D modeling application that allows you to trace or extrude scanned
in images, then you might want to draw your model with ruler accuracy. This
creates perfectly straight lines, which makes extruding them easy. In the fly-through
house example, the sketch is just a reference for the model and was not traced.

Figure 3.1. A sketch of the initial
floor plan of the fly-through house.

When drawing your 3D models, try to sketch out as much detail as possible, so
that when you begin working in the modeling application, you can create the
objects the first time through the process of creating the model. In this
example, you should sketch where you want the windows, doors (and how they
open), and the places you want lighting.